In Pablo Larraín’s biographical drama “Maria,” opera diva Maria Callas tells her doctor, “My life is opera.” The film, and Angelina Jolie’s tour-de-force performance, are too. Only opera could render in such minute, telling detail the final week of Callas’ life, frail and drifting through her apartment and the streets and cafes of Paris, interrogating her past and clinging to the idea that she might finally be able to sing for herself.
As cinematographer Ed Lachman told IndieWire, “The whole conceptual idea was that the film itself becomes an opera. It has the aesthetics, form, and themes of an opera. The themes are about betrayal, unrequited love, and loss — this is what her life was.”
The film is almost transcendent in the ways that everything coalesces, from Jolie’s own star persona informing our reaction to her performance as Callas to the ways that the creative team amplifies, exposes, and elides Callas’ life and complicated feelings about her career; her lover, Aristotle Onassis; and her talent.
The Callas Curls
Larraín thought they might be able to get away with three wigs, but hair designer Adruitha Lee knew better. “Three?” she remembered thinking. “We can start there.”
Ultimately, Lee used 12 wigs to transform Jolie into Callas, both in the last week of her life and as Callas in her prime, onstage in some of her iconic roles. They come at the viewer in operatic bursts, Callas performing to rapturous crowds in a range of roles, from Madea to Anna Bolena.
“Madea was Pablo’s favorite opera,” Lee said. “That one was going to be included no matter what.” That particular recreation allowed Lee and Jolie something they had long wanted: the opportunity to use red hair for a role. But for the most part, we see Callas at the end of her life, her long curls loose around her face as she glides through the rooms of her apartment. Larraín’s only directive was that her hair had to be loose enough to push back from her face; after much trial and error, Lee created the perfect coarse curls with Alberto VO5 and paper towels, threading in plenty of gray.
The work is subtle, turning Jolie into a more fragile, delicate Callas than what we see in her memories without resorting to slavish imitation. As Lee said, “I didn’t want the hair to be the story. We had that last year [with other films] where bits and pieces became the story, and I wanted the hair to be invisible.”
One moment when the hair is very much visible, though, came in the memories of Callas’ farewell London tour. The sequence arrived during a busy shooting day, as Lee recalled: “We didn’t have enough time to put another wig on her — so it’s two wigs! But if you look at photos, it looks like she’s wearing two wigs. There were always a lot of hair pieces. I told Angie, this one we’re gonna nail!”
Dressing La Divina
As equally distinctive as Maria’s hair is the luxurious, floor-length wool dressing gown she wears in her apartment. Jolie told IndieWire that it “grounded” her in the present; costume designer Massimo Cantini Parrini told IndieWire, “I wanted the dressing gown that I created for the film to be a sort of protection for Maria in her home environment, I wanted her to feel protected wearing it.”
Parrini made it large and in wool to give it a fluidity as Jolie moved, choosing an ivory fabric to “transmit inner peace to the viewer and be in contrast with the black clothes she wears to go out.”
Surprisingly, Parrini kept the robe’s design a secret from both director and star. “I was really happy that Angelina loved this costume because it is also one of my favorites from the movie,” he said. “I created the robe without telling anyone as if it was a little secret that I wanted to share with her and Pablo. I had a 50/50 chance that she would like it or not, but in my heart, I knew that I had hit the mark with this choice, and I was very grateful for it.”
The robe is in sharp contrast to Maria’s more structured clothes in which she staunchly faces the world — still chic but notably less glamorous than in flashbacks to her heyday. Compare her strikingly simple, impeccably tailored outfit when she meets John F. Kennedy to the high-collared jacket and hat she wears walking through Paris. This is no longer a woman who basks in public adulation; as Parrini noted, she is dressing “to camouflage herself, to not be noticed.”
Far more noticeable (and an oft-published production photo) are the enormous glasses Maria wears in the film. “I designed [them] personally, both the frame and the lenses,” Parrini said. “I imagined that they were, for her, a screen for the outside world, as if no one could read her soul through the gaze covered by those thick lenses that she always hated and never wore in photos. Maria Callas, without glasses, was practically blind, so her talent in the theater was also that of acting without [seeing]!”
A Sanctuary That Unsettles
Maria’s ivory dressing gown might give her comfort, but her apartment can be an uncomfortably chaotic place, even without family members or a stream of visitors. “The goal was to bring Pablo’s vision to life, seeing the opulence but also the emptiness of Maria’s world,” production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas told IndieWire. “Maria as a precious jewel and her apartment as a well-crafted jewelry box.”
Maria’s study was well-documented, but Dyas designed the kitchen and bedroom based on the needs of the story. “We meticulously created floor plans with all of the period-accurate details, including the distinctive, tall, elegant windows and high ceilings,” he said. “At the same time, the script demanded an interpretative approach, designed to reflect Maria’s inner world and tell the story of her life. With films about real people and events, the goal is always to find the balance between authenticity and storytelling, seamlessly blending the real and the imagined. The apartment set embodies the idea of Maria’s life as an opera on and off the stage.”
And like an opera, the prosaic and the extraordinary exist side by slide in Maria’s inner sanctum. “I created a concept sketch for Maria’s vanity table based on a photograph of Maria in her dressing room at a Chicago venue,” Dyas said. “The unusual ‘bullet-shaped‘ lights were fused with an elegant round mirror and more traditional counter top, all designed with secret camera ports for shooting close and sometimes difficult angles.”
Reflected alongside Maria is an array of classical busts on the floor (“Some of them broken and damaged with time, another metaphor that visually showed Maria’s wealth and yet broken state of mind”) as well as racks of clothes in lieu of a closet. “The racks of clothes are important because they remind the audience about Maria’s status as a fashion icon and they also help evoke her life on stage and the many beautiful costumes she wore throughout her career,” Dyas said. “It’s a snapshot of her life through clothes. We wanted everything in Maria’s apartment to feel orderly, theatrical, but also upon closer inspection slightly chaotic and broken.”
That extended to Maria’s bedroom, as well, which is dwarfed by an enormous bed. “The bed was something I sketched out as a larger-than-life representation of Maria’s personality,” Dyas said. “After completing the structure, we spent hours carefully creating the gold finishes and picking fabrics for the headboard and bedding that would work with the lighting and atmosphere. By completion, the bedroom became a space that shifts moods depending on Maria’s emotions, allowing us to see the world through Maria’s eyes and allowing the audience to feel her contradictions.”
As Lachman pointed out to IndieWire, Maria’s home should be a haven — and yet as the time of her death approaches, outside forces begin to breach her fortress. “I’ve always used color not purely as a decorative means, but as a psychological means,” he said. “I always think of warm and cool colors, and how they interact. So her apartment has the warmth of a nest, like she’s hiding from the world outside, but then it’s invaded by cooler colors like green.”
And throughout, there is the haunting image of Maria performing as if onstage, even in her everyday life. She’s unable to stop performing, even as she wryly acknowledges it. Lachman’s wide lenses also frame Maria in her environments, like an actress on a stage — or an animal in a cage. “It’s subjective and reflective at the same time, the way an audience would view a performance,” Lachman said.
“Maria” will stream on Netflix December 11. It is in select theaters now.
